Music&Silence Seminar :: A BLOG

This one was different, different from our usual happenings , and - a little surprisingly - different from the Music&Silence groups we were sharing together a decade or so ago.

We spent the first half of the group searching for, in various ways, the Still Point...

The Still Point?

Put it this way, as the great poet T.S.Eliot does in his classic poem - my favourite of all poems ever - The Four Quartets:

Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The still point? That place in you which is your basic aliveness, before anything is added. The place your cat or your dog is in each moment, before any activity. Also 'the tree space' - just being, being, being (rain and storms and blossoms and birds on top, added). It is –what is there and who you are before 'something or other' comes, to which we respond, and then are off again into the trajectory of our lives.

Or as Zen Masters have said, time & again, often as their final dying advice: "Just this!"

The simple basic experience of being alive! And then staying with that, moment by moment, and even keeping with it when action starts to happen...

Then the still point, as such, can disappear on its own, as it did for me. Where to? Ah! Into the action that comes, which somehow, and even it seems miraculously, contains the still point in its movements.

So, as the poet says: no still point, no movement - and no dance. And the dance is us, is life, and yet the dance cannot happen without the still point because from and out of that super still point our life activity is launched.

Later on in the group we played with that, in ways we do, including an hour's bout in our wonderful garden here, about which, afterwards, Chasara wrote me a beautiful letter sharing her experience during that time; here is part of it:

In the garden...nothing but the Dance!sitting on a stone, nature unfolding its dance all around,nowhere to go, just now here! ...a little grasshopper, easily jumping from one place to another, what makes him stay or jump? never knowing where he will land....a little spider on my hand dancing through my fingers, and then in falling gets hold of her spider's thread...Everything so alive, what a dance of life - a perfect life! The whole 4 days an infinite dance of love in oneness.

And the music, seeming to be always fitting - adding, guiding, joining, intensifying...

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